I come from a world where the word ‘trauma’ doesn’t exist, because we are too poor. I didn’t have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn’t all that bad.
AYAAN HIRSI ALIUnlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one.
More Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
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I would rather clean than beg.
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Bear true witness, even if it be against yourselves, your parents or your family.
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Every time you take a train, step into your car, walk into the shopping mall, go to the airport – every single time, something could happen. That’s how terrorism works.
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Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn’t make it easier.
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There are some mosques with facilities for women; it’s usually a back room with a back-door entrance.
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Americans have always welcomed people of all backgrounds, religions, and races. It’s a spirit of tolerance, now energized and amplified by the cult of multiculturalism.
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In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.
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The idea that if people are just friendly and demonstrate they want peace, that will be answered with good will – that is really naive.
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I assume the closest members of my family don’t actually want to kill me, but the truth is that I have shamed and hurt them; they have to deal with the outrage that my public statements cause, and undoubtedly some members of my clan do want to kill me for that.
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I’d like Muslims to look at their religion as a set of beliefs that they can appraise critically and pick and choose from.
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You have to let individuals make their own choices and respect that, even if it’s your own child. And that’s what was taken away from me. My father passed away thinking I still had to go back to his way of believing.
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But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can’t acquire knowledge.
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I have had to pay a price for leaving Islam and for speaking out. I have to pay for round-the-clock security because of the death threats against me.
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I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that Islam is peace and tolerance.
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I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
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I want people to emphasize life before death as opposed to life after death.
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What I find daunting always is to stand on a stage and talk to people, whether they agree with me or not.
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My conscience is informed by reason. It’s like Kant’s categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.
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When I was with the Labor Party, I’d get into trouble because the party bosses determined that some of what I wrote, or proposed to write about, wasn’t conducive to their policies or to electoral success.
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After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.
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Unlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one.
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No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that’s what the West is all about.
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In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious…. The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person’s skin had burned off.
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I lived in countries that had no democracy. so I don’t find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don’t know what it is not to have freedom.
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I confront the European elite’s self-image as tolerant ‘while under their noses women are living like slaves.
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I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI